Contents tagged with English
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My MIX11 Recap: Day 3
There is always something sad about the last day of a conference. The sight of attendees with suitcases in the hallways, the noise of (de-)construction outside the session rooms during the talks and the overall fatigue after several conference days (not to mention the attendee party).
But the last day of MIX11 turned out to be great with high-quality talks that made me forget my “last day blues”.
Session: The Future of HTML5
Session: Filling the HTML5 Gaps with Polyfills and Shims
These were two interesting and informative sessions on what is not exactly my favorite topic. Having programmed (and debugged) large amounts of Javascript code in the past I must say that I’m not really a fan of the HTML5 hype. And while the sessions were well done, the information they provided didn’t really increase my enthusiasm for HTML5.
Session: Mind Bending UX - UX Lightning Series
The third session of the UX lightning series, and again a winner.
- What Software can Learn from the World of Magic
- Extending the Human DNA with Design
- What Brains, Football and Hobbits teach us about Designer & Developer
- Farming for Ideas: How to Be The Most Creative You
Thought-proviking and funny. Needless to say the room was packed.
Session: Good JavaScript Habits for C# Developers
This great presentation showed how modern Javascript should be used and what C# developers often do wrong when moving from one “curly braces language” to another. Interesting that some of the concepts that would have seemed exotic just a few years ago now feel familiar to C# developers – a sign shows how much C# has evolved with the addition of lambdas and closures.
Session: Advanced Features in Silverlight 5
The last session of MIX11 and a great way to end a conference. Unfortunately many of the features shown are not in the beta bits, but nevertheless I’m excited about what’s coming to Silverlight. I really liked the presentation style which showed good preparation.
Next up: My MIX11 Recap: Summary
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My MIX11 Recap: Day 2
The second keynote of MIX11 covered (mostly) Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 5 and Kinect. Before getting to upcoming Windows Phone features, Joe Belfiore explained what happened (or not happened) with the WP7 updates. While it sounded plausible, it also differed from the initial message regarding updates for WP7 and Microsoft’s control over it. My take-away from the presentation of the features of the “Mango” update: Lots of catching up to other phones OSes, some features (like deep linking) demonstrating a specific direction and vision behind Windows Phone. Promising, but Android and iPhone aren’t sleeping.
Then, finally: Silverlight. Huge applause from the crowd. No wonder, because regardless who I talked to at MIX: Silverlight devs love their platform. The choice of an example site shown during this segment was odd: The Blue Angels’ website? Oh, yes, video. Hmm. But not exactly what I would use as a demo case for Silverlight. After that ScottGu showed a few Silverlight 5 features, but the Silverlight segment turned out to be rather short.
The keynote ended with a segment on Kinect. Some cool demos here – man I wish they’d shown them on day 1 during the keynote that ended half an hour early. Nice surprise: Every attendee got a Kinect. Not a dumb idea, because if there’s a crowd that will not only hook up the gift to an XBox, but will also use the Kinect SDK for PCs (coming May 13th), then it’s the MIX11 attendees.
When the keynote was over, something was still missing. There was no Bill Buxton, no UX content at all. Later I heard somebody say he felt that MIX was “hijacked by devs” and turned into a developer conference. I cannot disagree.
Session: Building In Browser Experiences with Silverlight 5
Not an exciting, but solid presentation showing off new features such as implicit data templates, custom markup extensions, binding within style setters, text layout and databinding debugging. I’m really looking forward to the final release of SL5.
Session: Crafty UX - UX Lightning Series
The second of the sessions from the UX lightning series. Word of mouth that had praised the first session quickly filled the room with people, and they were not to be disappointed.
- 10 Minute UX Ninja
- Conceptual Design – Tactics and Techniques
- Phidgets & Real-Time Sensor Data Visualization
- Prototyping Interfaces with Motion Graphics
Interesting stuff, and the 10 minutes limit really made the presenters prepare their talks well – something that always pays off.
Session: Back to Square One
This was a pretty “fluffy” session, but that was to be expected from Nishant Kothary, who I first heard last year with “The Elephant in the Room”. Like last year the talk covered human factors. It was hurt a bit by the (way too long) story of the airline pilot who unexpectedly did the wrong thing. That was a pity because that story conveyed an important message: Under pressure to achieve a certain goal, people will do things that appear to be a good solution without checking all possible outcomes – something that happens often enough in user interfaces.
Attendee Party
Nice location, great DJ. At some point the loudness of the music didn’t really help to keep the promise of “a 72-hour conversation”.
Next up: My MIX11 Recap: Day 3
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My MIX11 Recap: Day 1
With the pre-con day being somewhat underwhelming, the hopes were high for some energy from the keynote to get MIX11 truly started. In the end it not only failed to energize the crowd (judging by the comments on the hallways and on Twitter afterwards), but it also didn’t take the chance to reiterate a message that some commentators of the “Standards-based web, plug-ins and Silverlight” blog post seem to have missed (quote): “Neither plug-ins nor standards-based approaches, however, represent the single answer to client development”.
Obviously Microsoft has to tout their capabilities in the shiny new world of HTML5, but I think it’s a huge mistake to let it happen that Silverlight is declared dead by people who have no idea how tough it is in the enterprise to roll out a new browser. Maybe these people also think that the IT departments are simply too dumb or lazy and that their fear of breaking mission-critical web applications from the IE6/7-era is completely unfounded.
Session: HTML5 for Silverlight Developers
Being a Silverlight developer, this session sounded like something I should attend - and it was. While not being perfect in terms of presentation (too many apples and oranges comparisons between HTML5 and Silverlight for my taste), it was interesting to see where HTML5 is today and were it is currently lacking.
Session: Fonts, Form and Function: A Primer on Digital Typography
Robby Ingebretsen rocks, period. Passion, competence and great presentation skills. Watch the video!
Session: Inspiring UX - UX Lightning Series
Four speakers, ten minutes each, slides advancing automatically. This sounded like an interesting concept and as user experience (UX) is an important part of my daily work, I thought this session would by worth checking out.
- Why is that monkey wearing no pants?
- 21st Century Design
- Goodbye Mouse, Hello Touch
- Lessons in Design
After hearing these “presentation-lets”, I only had one wish: MORE! Others had the same feeling and Twitter exploded with praise, leading to crammed rooms during the other sessions of the UX Lightning Series in the following days.
Ask the Experts
Known from other conferences but this time with a “speed dating” twist and prepared questions as conversation starters, this simply didn’t work for me. I was hungry and wanted something to eat but food was only available at the (full) experts tables. And the Elvis-impersonator abusing the microphone didn’t help either. Let’s put is this way: I left the building before Elvis.
Next up: My MIX11 Recap: Day 2
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My MIX11 Recap: Open Source Fest
On the evening of the pre-conference day Microsoft hosted the “Open Source Fest”. Open to all MIX attendees, this event allowed authors of open source software using current Microsoft technologies to present their projects.
This was a very interesting evening and overall I would rate it as a success. But there were some things that should be adressed by the organizers in the future that prevented the event from being truly great:
- It was loud. In a room crammed with tables full of computers and lots of people discussing the many projects that was inevitable. Maybe some movable walls (which also could be used to attach posters to it) would have helped, but the noise level was still tolerable. That was until…
- Some “rat-pack” impersonators came on stage and began singing. I found this not only disturbing the discussions, it was also an insult to the presenters of the project. Did the organizers think that the projects alone weren’t interesting enough?
- It was a bit too dark and the signs on the tables (showing the project’s name and the table number) were too small. Finding a specific project in the crowded room was difficult.
These nitpicks aside, I would like to see another Open Source Fest next year. It was great to see the projects being presented with great enthusiasm by their creators and there are quite a few I’ll take a further look at in the next weeks.
Next up: My MIX11 Recap: Day 1
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My MIX11 Recap: Day 0 (“Boot Camp”)
I started MIX11 with a day of "boot camps". Last year they were less dramatically called "workshops", but the overall concept remained the same: Two half-day sessions covering a specific topic each, with the promise that this topic can be covered in a different, more extensive way than in a typical session of 60 minutes. Last year's workshop day was worth its money (just for Robby Ingebretsen's fantastic "Design fundamentals for Developers" alone), unfortunately I cannot say the same about this year's boot camp day.
The first session "Design, Content, Code: Start-to-finish" described the work on the new website of the Blue Angels (http://www.blueangels.navy.mil/, not online yet). That was interesting and offered some useful details, but the talk definitely lacked a critical review. Over the timespan of 3 hours (minus the breaks) condensing the content just a little bit here and there would have saved a noticeable amount of time. And this in turn would have created space for some more technical or (equally important) conceptual information.
While the first session was OK(-ish), the second session "Windows Phone 7 Boot Camp" was a complete waste of time. The amount of actual content was laughable, the largest part was an introduction to Silverlight, barely touching WP7 specifics, and concepts in general were poorly presented.
Am I a bit too harsh or did I have unreasonable expectations? Well, what I did expect was to see more or less a presentation like that of Microsoft Germany as part of their "MS TechTalk" series (3 hours, free of charge). I saw that presentation some time ago, so my naive assumption was that (after forgetting some of the details since) the bootcamp would freshen up my WP7 knowledge again to the same level.
Unfortunately much time was wasted with "live coding" which I in general grow more and more critical of - but as that's not a simple "yes or no" issue, I'll cover that topic in a separate blog post.
Taking into account that the boot camp day cost my company 350$ plus an additional night in a hotel room, we'll have a very hard look at the cost-benefit ratio of the pre-conference day in the future.
Coming up: My MIX11 Recap: Open Source Fest
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Sponsor the Hottest .NET Community Event in Germany: dotnet Cologne 2011
The “dotnet Cologne” conference organized by the NET usergroups Bonn and Cologne quickly has become the .NET community event in Germany. So when we opened the registration for dotnet Cologne 2011 on Monday, we expected some interest. But we didn’t expect the 200 “early bird” seats to be gone in less than three hours! And the registrations at normal price keep coming in, so it looks like this event will sell out even earlier than last year.
In December I wrote about sponsorship opportunities at the dotnet Cologne 2011 – and why it’s a good idea to be a sponsor at this particular conference.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor: We still offer a wide variety of sponsorship packages in different sizes.
At our new, larger, event location, we still have space for exhibition booths. Last year’s exhibitors were very happy and had many interesting conversations with the attendees. And this year we planned for longer breaks between sessions, which means event more time for presenting your products. And yes, German developers understand English demos.
But maybe a booth is a bit too much for you. With the Bronze package, you can make sure the attendees receive promotional material of your company in their bags – for a fraction of what you’d pay at a commercial conference.
Or you could sponsor a couple of licenses of your product for the raffle at the end of the day.
If you want to learn more, just send an email to Roland.Weigelt at dotnet-koelnbonn.de and I’ll send you our sponsor information.
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MIX11 – I’ll be there!
In about 6 weeks I’ll start packing my bags, getting ready for my trip to MIX11.
MIX10 was a great experience so I don’t mind the long hours in the cramped space of economy class during my flight from Germany to Vegas. Let’s hope that the Silverlight sessions don’t clash as much with the UX sessions as they did last year.
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Welcome 2011
Things that happened in 2010
- MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read my report of MIX10 to see why.
- The dotnet Cologne 2010, the community conference organized by the .NET user group Köln and my own group Bonn-to-Code.Net became an even bigger success than I dared to dream of.
- There was a huge discrepancy between the efforts by Microsoft to support .NET user groups to organize public live streaming events of the PDC keynote (the dotnet Cologne team joined forces with netug Niederrhein to organize the PDCologne) and the actual content of the keynote. The reaction of the audience at our event was “meh” and even worse I seriously doubt we’ll ever get that number of people to such an event (which on top of that suffered from technical difficulties beyond our control).
- What definitely would have deserved the public live streaming event treatment was the Silverlight Firestarter (aka “Silverlight Damage Control”) event. And maybe we would have thought about organizing something if it weren’t for the “burned earth” left by the PDC keynote. Anyway, the stuff shown at the firestarter keynote was the topic of conversations among colleagues days later (“did you see that? oh yeah, that was seriously cool”).
Things that I have learned/observed/noticed in 2010
- In the long run, there’s a huge difference between “It works pretty well” and “it just works and I never have to think about it”. I had to get rid of my USB graphics adapter powering the third monitor (read about it in this blog post). Various small issues (desktop icons sometimes moving their positions after a reboot for no apparent reasons, at least one game I couldn’t get run at all, all three monitors sometimes simply refusing to wake up after standby) finally made me buy a PCIe 1x graphics adapter. If you’re interested: The combination of a NVIDIA GTX 460 and a GT 220 is running in “don’t make me think” mode for a couple of months now.
- PowerPoint 2010 is a seriously cool piece of software. Not only the new hardware-accelerated effects, but also features like built-in background removal and picture processing (which in many cases are simply “good enough” and save a lot of time) or the smart guides.
- Outlook 2010 crashes on me a lot. I haven’t been successful in reproducing these crashes, they just happen when every couple of days on different occasions (only thing in common: I clicked something in the main window – yeah, very helpful observation)
- Visual Studio 2010 reminds me of Visual Studio 2005 before SP1, which is actually not a good thing to say about a piece of software. I think it’s telling that Microsoft’s message regarding the beta of SP1 has been different from earlier service pack betas (promising an upgrade path for a beta to the RTM sounds to me like “please, please use it NOW!”).
- I have a love/hate relationship with ReSharper. I don’t want to develop without it, but at the same time I can’t fail to notice that ReSharper is taking a heavy toll in terms of performance and sometimes stability.
Things I’m looking forward to in 2011
- Obviously, the dotnet Cologne 2011. We already have been able to score some big name sponsors (Microsoft, Intel), but we’re still looking for more sponsors. And be assured that we’ll make sure that our partners get the most out of their contribution, regardless of how big or small.
- MIX11, period.
- Silverlight 5 is going to be great. The only thing I’m a bit nervous about is that I still haven’t read anything official on whether C# next version’s async/await will be in it. Leaving that out would be really stupid considering the end-of-2011 release of SL5 (moving the next release way into the future).
- MIX10 was absolutely fantastic. Read my report of MIX10 to see why.
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How a Firefox Issue Turned out to be a SSD Problem
I’ve used the holidays to finally install Windows 7 (x64) on my desktop computer. Vista x64 did a fine job, but compared to the Windows 7 system on my notebook it felt kind of old. And as a small Christmas present to myself, I decided to install the system on an SSD (a Crucial C300 SSD 256GB).
A fresh install of Win 7 on a new SSD in a computer which (under Vista) has already proven to be a great development and gaming machine – should be a killer combo, right?
Well, not quite. The first experiments after setting up the system were kind of sobering. The system, while being really fast, felt kind of sluggish every now and then. And that didn’t change after the computer ran for a while (i.e. building the search index was no longer a possible cause).
The most annoying issue was that Firefox often (but not always) took up to a second after clicking a link before it would navigate to a new page. Internet Explorer as well as Chrome did not show this behavior – at least it seemed.
If you search the web for “Firefox” and “sluggish”, you’ll get the impression that it might by a network problem. But after trying out various things and observing the system more closely, the idea dawned in my head that the SSD could be the problem.
And in fact it was. It turned out that there’s a problem with the current firmware 006 of the Crucial C300 SSD which leads to the dramatic spikes in an HD Tune benchmark (repeating the benchmark showed the spikes at different locations):
(ASUS P5Q Deluxe, Q9450, 8GB RAM, SSD drive attached to on-board SATA2 controller.
Update 2011-01-01: Note that the measurements were done while testing in IDE mode)The drive came with firmware 002 and after performing a quick “smoke test” I upgraded it to 006. Unfortunately there’s no safe way to go back.
A thread in the Crucial forum contained various tips for a workaround (some of which involved turning of automatic TRIM which others strongly cautioned against). What did help me was to “turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device” in the device manager:
After I did that the system felt much better, and the benchmark showed no more dramatic spikes:
Of course the warning on the dialog box did not go unnoticed and I hope that Crucial will release a firmware update soon.
But right now the drive (and the overall system) is performing fine.
Update 2011-01-01: The system was originally installed with the drive in AHCI mode, then the drive was switched to IDE during testing. That’s when the benchmarks for the original blog post were run. I’m now back to AHCI mode, here are the benchmark results:
You’ll notice the higher transfer rate; the results would be even better if the drive was attached to a SATA3 controller.
Note that switching the mode (from IDE to AHCI) in the BIOS cleared the “magic” checkbox mentioned in the blog post so at first the system was stuttering again.
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How to Reach German Developers: dotnet Cologne 2011
If you want to promote tools, technologies, libraries, trainings or anything else of interest to software developers, you want to reach the right audience. Not the 9-to-5 people, but those who have the knowledge and passion that make them important multipliers.
A great way to reach these people are community conferences. They are not the kind of conference that the 9-to-5 folks are “sent to” by their company, but that the right people hear of via Twitter, Facebook, blogs or plain old word-of-mouth and choose to go to, often covering the costs for the day themselves (travel, entrance fee, hotel, taking the day off).
If you want to reach German developers there is one conference that has emerged as the large .NET community conference in Germany, quickly growing beyond being just a local event: The dotnet Cologne, that will be held for the third time on May 6, 2011 and that I’m co-organizing (this interview gives you a good idea of the history).
This year’s dotnet Cologne 2010 with its 300 attendees was a huge success. As in the year before, the conference was sold out weeks in advance, and feedback by attendees and sponsors was positive throughout. And the list of speakers and attendees sounded like a “who is who” of the German .NET community.
Whether you‘d like to present a product, a service or your company: you will meet the right target audience at dotnet Cologne. We’re offering a broad variety of sponsorship opportunities, ranging from being a donor for the large raffle at the end of the day (software licenses, books, training vouchers, etc.) up to having a booth and/or giving a sponsored talk about your product (not necessarily in German, English is not a problem). Among the various sponsorship levels (bronze/silver/gold/platinum) there’s most likely a package that will suit your needs – and if not, we’re open for suggestions.
We’re happy to announce that already at this point in time (with over five months to go) we have a steadily growing list of partners: Microsoft, Intel, IDesign, SubMain, Comma Soft AG, GFU Köln, and EC Software.
If you want to become a sponsor for the dotnet Cologne 2011, drop me a line at Roland.Weigelt at dotnet-koelnbonn.de and I’ll send you our sponsor info.
